Downtown With Bianca

The first time I encountered Bianca was watching a short film my friend Roxy Shih had written and directed. Her performance was riveting. I knew I had to shoot with her so I dropped Roxy a line, got B's info. From there it was simply nailing down a date.

I picked her up at her Hollywood home and as we drove, the conversation turned to her latest theatre run, social issues, life in general. "I have lots of ideas and opinions," she tells me. She did, and they were awesome.

While she brought a ton of intensity - which was what had drawn me to her in the first place - there was far more to Bianca than that. In person, she was a bright spark of restless intellectual energy. While we were shooting, she would hold a pose and I would watch her eyes change as some new thought entered her mind and she would drift away. We laughed a lot about it.

At one point we were shooting in an alley. The odors there were impossible to ignore.

"Listen, if it gets to be too much, please tell me and we'll find another place to shoot," I tell her.

Bianca looks at me for a moment and says "Hey, I'm from Detroit. Let's keep shooting." And grins.

Even as she's pursuing acting, Bianca spends a huge amount of her time - well, donating her time. One of the organizations she works with is Spark, a nonprofit dedicated to providing apprenticeships to youth in underserved communities. She is, in short, pretty damn awesome and I can't wait to shoot with her again.